The Brooklyn Bridge seems ageless in its monumental beauty, but Saturday marks the glorious span’s 125th year of connecting New York City to itself. To celebrate the occasion, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is offering a free, onetime screening that afternoon of a 1981 documentary about the structure by a filmmaker who is himself a fixture of American history — on the storytelling side of the equation.

“Brooklyn Bridge” marked the debut of the popular mythmaker and PBS stalwart Ken Burns. If something’s American, and historical, and big, Mr. Burns has “done” it. The Civil War, baseball, jazz, and, most recently, World War II have all received his signature treatment. “Brooklyn Bridge,” which made its premiere at BAM 27 years ago, was the start of it all.

“I learned everything” from the five-year production period of the film, Mr. Burns said recently from the offices of his production company, Florentine Films, in New Hampshire. “I learned how to get inside photographs, how to shoot, the patience of looking from every vantage, day and night.”

The 58-minute documentary, which is divided evenly between the embattled construction of the bridge and its reception, bears all the hallmarks of Mr. Burns’s style, especially his dynamic use of still photos, extensive readings in voice-over from contemporary documents, and an unabashed tone of wonder about the American endeavor. The historian David McCullough, whose book on the bridge inspired Mr. Burns, and a rosy-cheeked Lewis Mumford sit in to join the chorus.

The result is a stirring record of how engineering know-how and valiant persistence overcame what were often petty obstacles ranging from a bait-and-switch fraud scheme by a steel cable manufacturer to Franco-American suspicion.

But the movie is equally significant for popularizing a certain approach to history on film that, for better or worse, has defined the documentary form for millions of viewers and a generation of filmmakers. Mr. Burns is not shy about wearing that mantle and taking responsibility for a cinematic technique of examining photos that famously became a standard tool on Mac software — the “Ken Burns effect.”

“No one ever sold a film with first-person narration or still photos to tell a story,” Mr. Burns said of his debut, which was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar in 1982. “But then it became this huge success.”

In truth, Mr. Burns’s inspiring enthusiasm may get the better of him; in the world of documentary alone, the use of still photos was actually pioneered in a 1957 film about the Gold Rush by Canadians Colin Low and Wolf Koenig (filmmakers whom Mr. Burns has credited in the past). The device would flourish on NBC’s prime-time historical series, “Project XX,” in the following decade.

But it’s impossible to deny that “Brooklyn Bridge” and the films that followed it (including the 60-minute “The Statue of Liberty” and the 88-minute “Huey Long”) made Mr. Burns the first nonfiction filmmaker to attain household-name status, a distinction that has only recently been usurped by Michael Moore. “The Civil War,” his real breakthrough, was a gargantuan (more than 11 hours) and surprising success in 1990, arguably tapping the same need for communal reconciliation that also made “Gone with the Wind” and “Roots” two of the most watched films in 20th-century film and television.

“My goal has been to transcend the smaller ‘p’ of politics, and I’ve gone on from ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ to engage a variety of subjects,” the Brooklyn-born Mr. Burns said. “I’m sure we’re all aware of hugely successful polemical films that speak to the choir. But to each his own; I’m sure my stuff is a bitter pill for some.”

Indeed, Mr. Burns has seen his share of criticism, mostly stemming from individuals and groups who feel slighted when they don’t appear in his compulsively inclusive histories. Most recently, protests from Hispanic groups over his World War II chronicle, “The War,” led to a reworking of the film. Others have grumbled about the simplification of political matters, sleight of hand in the use or reuse of photos, and, with “Jazz” especially, glaring omissions from cultural timelines. More generally, the case of the warm fuzzies glowing within the series’ patriotic spirit has been a take-it-or-leave-it element for many viewers.

But these are, arguably, all ways of saying that Mr. Burns’s oeuvre is what it is — a work of popular history — and “Brooklyn Bridge” can be a refreshing change from current documentary styles. The primary materials — letters from mastermind engineer Washington Roebling, pseudo-witty editorials from contemporary journals, architectural sketches — feel grounded, informative, and functionally elegant in a way that is absent from much of today’s niche-market marginalia.

In the years since the film’s arrival, Mr. Burns has secured all-important funding on a consistent basis from public television and elsewhere to pursue his projects freely (culminating with a recently signed 10-year contract with PBS). The lucrative television model, with its episodic format, has allowed Mr. Burns to extend his histories into notoriously elongated affairs.

But in 1981, of course, the money was touch and go.

“It was turned down from foundation sources,” Mr. Burns said of “Brooklyn Bridge.” “This child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge!” When cash came, it was an adventure. Meade Esposito (the Democratic party leader who reigned over Brooklyn politics for a quarter century before being convicted in a 1988 influence-peddling scandal) handed me a check. I went up to a second floor of some office and he just handed me an envelope.”

If the landscapes of New York and documentary film have changed since then, “Brooklyn Bridge” remains an enjoyable Burnsian artifact — a piece of old New York, as well as a filmmaker’s aperitif that presaged the all-you-can-eat opuses to come. (“Now I know how to extend the caisson fire sequence [in ‘Brooklyn Bridge’] into 15 minutes,” Mr. Burns said excitedly.)

Work on his next project, about our country’s national parks, will preclude Mr. Burns’s attendance at BAM on Saturday, to his great regret. (“It’s like my first child.”) But for the rest of us, the screening is a walk or subway ride away — and a mere stroll from experiencing the film’s subject firsthand. As you leave the theater, the film’s concluding paean to the structure, improvised by none other than Arthur Miller, will ring in your ears: “Maybe you, too, could make something that could be lasting and beautiful.”

If that doesn’t put a twinkle in your eye, don’t blame Ken Burns.

“Brooklyn Bridge” screens Saturday at 4:30 p.m. at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).